Gigantic physical bitcoin

[julz]

One of the reasons Casascius coins are considered trustworthy by many, is that they are assembled under strict control by one person, Mike Caldwell - whose business, reputation (and perhaps personal safety?!) depend on him not disclosing, leaking or keeping a copy of the key.

Doing this on a massive scale without assistance or being seen, might be tricky!

[weex]

That Yap stones were hard to move makes me wonder about an analog. If you wanted to make BTCs hard for a community to move you would generate and encrypt the privkey with a random passphrase of crackable size.

So you say, here's the privkey. It's encrypted with a 13 character passphrase including letters, uppercase, numbers, and special characters and it becomes a sort of prize.

Maybe it becomes easier then to move the coins by legal contract rather than by the blockchain.

Or cracking the passphrase becomes a sort of transaction fee on making a transfer noted in the block chain.

Finally, nobody says the encrypted privkey needs to be public. There could be some additional process to gain access to that particular ciphertext.